By Darryl Sparey, MD at Hard Numbers
After I sold my business, Media Report to media monitoring business Precise in 2006, I was no longer needed as the MD of the company. At 25, I was effectively redundant. But, the company still wanted me around the place to help with the integration, and be a point of contact for clients. And I needed something to usefully do full time. So I said “I’ll do sales”.
I sat in a bear pit sales office for the first six months of my time at Precise, using our then locally installed CRM system Maximiser, and I made a LOT of sales calls. I dialed and dialed and dialed. So much so that another member of the sales team wrote their own version of “Money, Money, Money” by Abba, with lyrics dedicated to my outbound sales efforts.
To say that this is an unsophisticated approach to generating demand is an understatement. It’s door-to-door, but with dialing. And now, over twenty years later, I feel that I’ve been inexorably drawn towards a greater appreciation and usage of marketing, PR and inbound approaches to generate business, like Tantive IV being drawn relentlessly towards a Galactic Empire Starship.
I’ve learned an appreciation of the value of marketing through my career, and its essential role in generating demand and interest in products and services when companies aren’t necessarily “in market”.Good marketing and communications doesn’t mean that you never need to dial out again. But, when marketing and sales work in tandem, they can be more than the sum of their parts. When they work with one another, in concert, they can drive an incrementally greater volume of leads, opportunities and, ultimately, sales. (Fun fact: An alternate, unused name for “Hard Numbers” was “Symphony” for this reason).
Sales is the best source of insight into the 4 Ps for marketers - what are the product development requirements based on failed prospect feedback; objections that can be the basis of content for marketing to create content for promotion; the best places, trade shows and events to attend to engage with your prospects; and guidance on the price the market will genuinely bear.
Marketing and communications can create content, coverage and experiences which position a company, product or service as being genuinely unique and differentiated, and drive greater awareness and interest.
Marketing and communications can help support sales at every stage of the sales process. Naturally, perhaps, many businesses gravitate towards measuring and focusing on “awareness” or the “top of funnel” role that marketing and PR can play. And, through category creation, inspirational thought leadership content, high quality research into the customer audience, and creating opportunities for engagement with prospective customers, marketing can support sales with a higher volume of leads.
But, as Notorious BIG would have said, had he ever hustled in the B2B sales world, “more MQLs, more problems”. We’ve seen a trend with companies in the B2B space in wanting to focus further down the funnel. In part, I suspect that’s because they’ve spent a LOT of money over the last three to five years or more “buying” leads. The question now becomes, “when are those leads going to buy”? And, again, marketing and PR can help move prospects from “interest” to “action”.
One of the first things we do at Hard Numbers is to ask new clients what the three most common objections or reasons for failed opportunities are from the sales team. From these insights we can create content to be used, both on-site and off-site, in earned media, to handle these objections. This becomes sales collateral that can directly support efforts and help convince prospective clients.
Marketers can create content that supports the sales journey in other ways: Online widgets or ROI calculators, content about creating and managing an RFP or RFP templates, implementation guides, customer communities or training and support assets are all content which can be created to support the journey of a prospective customer to a paying customer.
If some of this doesn’t sound like a lot like a PR or marketing company would say but sounds like something else, maybe it is. Maybe it speaks to how we think differently at Hard Numbers. What ultimately matters to us, and to our clients, isn’t activity. It's the results. We’ll do what’s needed to drive the ultimate result for our clients. That’s why we’ve always had account based marketing and lead generation as core parts of our service, and why we’re an agency that’s comfortable in being measured against commercial KPIs.
An old boss of mine used to say that there should be a separation between sales and marketing, like church and state. I understood the rationale for this at that point of my career. But now, in a highly competitive world of perfect and completely available product information and increasingly undifferentiated products and services, sales and marketing NEED to work with one another. Sorry if I have to finish this blog a little abruptly. The phone’s ringing..
